Thomas Perry - The Informant

Every stitch or kink or abrasion brought back to him the motion that had caused it. Both of his hands had a soreness across the palm, where the nylon cord from his poncho had been attached to the homemade handle. He had gripped the handles hard, keeping the loop as tight as he could around the sentry's neck. It had been a very long time since he had strangled a man, and the muscles had gone soft. He had gone soft.

He was over fifty years old. If, by some miracle, the life he had led in the United States had not been interrupted-had not been ended by his client's betrayal and attempts to kill him-he would still have retired by now. He wouldn't have spent last night on a mountain in Arizona strangling and knifing people. It would have been impossible for anybody to stay in the killing trade for that long without being killed. The only old hit men were people like Little Norman in Las Vegas, making the rounds each day to check his sources and be sure nothing had come in off the desert to disturb the tranquil atmosphere of the casinos. Norman wasn't a killer anymore. He was a weather man. Each day he would reassure the dozen or so powerful old capos in town that the weather in Vegas was still just fine.

When Schaeffer was very young, Eddie Mastrewski had warned him to make himself strong. "Now is the time to train yourself. Today you can make yourself the winner of whatever happens thirty years from now. If you die in that fight, it's because you didn't work hard enough today." Eddie had been strong. He was a Pennsylvania Polack from the coal country. He always corrected that. "I'm a Ukrainian." When he had taken the boy on a visit to his hometown in Pennsylvania, everybody for fifty miles around seemed to be built like a pile of rocks. Whichever godforsaken place in the Balkans their parents came from, they must have had to fight their way out because there weren't any weaklings. There were only people who had been injured or worked themselves into old age.

Eddie had drilled him in all of the basic techniques of depriving an enemy of his breath and heartbeat. He had also taught him the rest of the trade-how to read the signs in a neighborhood to tell whether the job was going to be a simple walk-in or a risky, drawn-out battle for the victim's life. What had happened last night was that he had fallen back on Eddie's most important lesson-that everything that went on was only a series of steps to his inevitable victory.

Eddie never permitted the idea of failure to enter his consciousness. "We're the wolf, they're the deer. Are they going to eat us? No. It might take a while to get them, but the universe isn't going to change so they win."

He was still the wolf. He had gone to get Frank Tosca, and so Tosca was dead. But his exhaustion today was disturbing. He wasn't the same as he had been. Time had gone by and he hadn't noticed, but it had still gone by.

He wanted to rest and recover, but it was time to get out of Phoenix. He packed his small suitcase and turned on his laptop computer. He made a plane reservation from Tucson to Houston in the name Charles Ackerman and a hotel reservation for the next two nights at a hotel he knew near the Astrodome.

As he passed the front desk, he left his checkout card and key in front of a clerk who was on the telephone and went outside. He got in his rental car and drove to a bank not far down the street in Scottsdale. He rented a safe-deposit box and paid three years' rent in advance. He opened the box in a small windowless room and put in the pistol he had taken from the dead sentry and the extra magazine and the knife he had used to kill Tosca.

The route to Tucson was flat, straight, and easy to drive. He passed a prison crew in orange jumpsuits working on a weedy patch along the highway under the eyes of a guard with a lever-action. 30-30 rifle like a movie cowboy would have used. It reminded him of something else Eddie had told him. "One thing we have to do is stay out of jail. A lot of the guys we deal with spend half their lives getting in or getting out. It's something between a religious retreat and a family reunion. They've got old friends, cousins, and in-laws in there. And half of the rest of the place is people who want to suck up to them, including the guards. If you go in, there will be people who knew somebody you killed. There will be people who want you to kill somebody in there for them, and others who want you to kill somebody when you get out. There will be guys so crazy they want to know what makes you so tough so you have to kill them to show them."

The speed limit was sixty-five, so he went sixty-five, going faster only in the stretches where the rest of the cars did and a slower car would have stood out. He never stood out. He had always dressed neatly and conservatively, and since he had been in England he had been forced to replace his clothes gradually, so he had the wardrobe of a man of Meg's social level. He could stand close inspection without raising suspicion, but he had perfected his pose of the taciturn American husband. He had good manners and a smile, so there was little scrutiny. People paid attention to the beautiful and lively Lady Meg Holroyd, but less to her husband. It was simply a new version of the way he carried himself in the United States. He was a master at being the one the eye passed over in a crowd.

He arrived at the Tucson airport two hours early, returned his rental car, and rode the shuttle to the terminal. He bought a newspaper and sat in the middle of a crowded waiting area. He pretended to read the paper, but devoted most of his attention to the people around him and the people walking past on the concourse.

There, as soon as he looked, was the short, stocky shape of Mickey Agnoli walking along in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of tan slacks, his shoes a pair of topsiders with no socks, looking as calm as though he had stepped off a yacht into the Tucson terminal. There seemed to be nobody with him.

As soon as Agnoli had passed and gone on along the concourse, Schaeffer got up, folded his newspaper and stuck it under his arm, and followed at a distance. Agnoli walked on the right side of the concourse so Schaeffer stayed on the left side, moving against the flow of people but a few paces inward so he wouldn't meet anyone head-on.

He had seen Agnoli from a distance on the ranch last night and had studied him for a moment before turning away to avoid him. He had looked very happy and prosperous, standing just outside the conference room. Agnoli had been a Strongiolo soldier in Miami since he was about nineteen, but over the years he had grown up a little. He had saved the money his crew picked up on their regular business of stealing luggage from airport baggage claims and selling fake tickets to cruises, and he bought parking lots. Ten years ago he had already been the parking king of Miami.

Schaeffer had met him on one of the worst nights of Agnoli's life. Agnoli's brother Jimmy had been found in a Dumpster behind one of their parking lots. Mickey had sent word up the ranks in the Strongiolo family that he wanted revenge. The response was a torn scrap of paper with a telephone number on it. He called the number, and a week later he met Schaeffer in a small Italian restaurant near the ocean.

They sat in a booth at the back of the dining room. Agnoli was a broad, short man, and he nearly took up the whole side of the booth that faced the wall. Schaeffer could see he'd been crying. Agnoli said, "Thank you for coming to see me. I've heard you're a busy man and don't like to spend a lot of time talking."

"I heard about your loss. I'm not in a hurry. If you want to talk, I'll listen."

Agnoli was surprised. "I didn't think you'd be… I don't know. So human."

Schaeffer's face showed nothing.

Agnoli's eyes widened. "I'm sorry. I should have said you're a decent guy and then shut up."